00:39 - Friday, Oct. 31, 2003 white sheet of theatre screen
As promised yet again: 2nd story for fiction workshop class.
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White Sheet of Theatre Screen
It was like a disease; no matter where I went or how high up or far down in the echelon I searched, the music teachers I found kept telling me with their inevitable long white mustaches and bony nimble fingers that there was a story behind my sheet music and I just needed to drag it out. All I wanted to do was learn to play Keith Emerson piano solos and be done with it, but they kept insisting on dead Russian composers with complexes.
�Drag, why drag?� I asked my last one, petulantly. �Must you use such a potent verb?�
It wasn�t like he cared whether I made it to Juilliard or not. �You have to drag it because it�s hiding,� he retorted.
�Maybe it�s hiding so well it�s erased itself.�
�You try writing a piece of music without a story to it, and you�ll see it�s impossible. Not only is it impossible to you, but it was impossible to Tchaikovsky. It�s there.�
Strangely enough, that was when I quit playing and starting composing. I might have done it just to spite him: here is some completely emotionless music; so there. What an accomplishment. He would never have the satisfaction of hearing me say this, but, indeed, it was impossible. I wrote a piece called �White Sheet of Theatre Screen� just to spite the latest mustached martyr and even considered mailing it to him, but, really, a white sheet of theatre screen would have swallowed my piece whole. Would have, and did.
This is the story of the white sheet of theatre screen. There is one, and it is here.
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We are going to a movie about crop circles in Europe. My friends� winter coats are heavy and gray in the weak March evening light as we slog through the leftover snow to the bus stop. Boulder smells like a broken glass that was full of wine a long time ago. Wine and rain. I am panicky for no reason. Sitting on the bus is claustrophobic like being down a mineshaft in Nebraska with the walls closing in; a cold wet Nebraska with the smell of wine and rain emanating from the cornstalks that fill the acres and acres nearby. This is all aside from the bus driver, of course, who is listening loudly to the Beastie Boys; whatever happened to them? She bounces, blonde, in time to the music. She doesn�t even stop long enough to check our ID�s.
Nebraska tilts crazy and Colorado appears like a Rubik�s Cube rotating. Half plains, half mountains, like I�m seeing it from a low-flying space shuttle, or a high-flying airplane. The foothills; the reaching cranes downtown; the matrix of streets. Finally the torn brown backs of the bus seats rise in my view. I sit down, hard. �Caitlin,� I whisper, �Caitlin, I want to go home.�
Caitlin is staring out the window at the mountains. Just a few days ago I was riding this same bus home and these two jocks were sitting across from me, wearing their baseball caps strategically positioned to the same side and intermittently punching one another in the shoulder. They weren�t speaking, but then one stared out the window and said to the other, �Man, the Flatirons are looking sweet today,� as if they were his girlfriend and he was about to claim them for a night of passion. Maybe this jock and the Flatirons would make a perfect couple and it was just that no one bothered to think about it.
Anyway, Caitlin is looking out the window in the exact same way, like she�s storing the mountains away in her memory so she can take them out to admire later. She doesn�t care that I want to go home, because she has tiny miniature mountains in an envelope in her mind, pushing their snowy peaks against the sticky flap.
It is very light upon very dark because of the strange mountain sunsets that I�ve never quite gotten used to, and my mouth is completely dry. The aftertaste of peach lemonade sits on my tongue, has been sitting there for hours, and saliva wells up in my throat intermittently but never makes it past the back of the tongue. I have not had a real panic attack in over a year, but I�ve had two this week. In voice class, unable to breathe suddenly. And today�s, stretched out over hours and hours of shakiness. It starts in the cafeteria, eating catfish and cucumbers and pasta; something above my left eyebrow pops and readjusts, and suddenly the whole room is completely out of whack; tilted; spinning. My stomach makes its first protest quietly, amid the silence in my head. Who knows where this comes from. It�s the most terrifying thing I can think of; this whole scene.
We are in the theatre. Watching the crop circles appear in the earth is not as unsettling as the fact that we automatically assume aliens for everything. I wonder what�s wrong with blaming it on the grass�s sense of humor, or the fact that maybe an English cow is a rocket scientist. Geometry makes my eyes blur; these circles, these crisscrosses. I fade out, tune into absurdity.
Oftentimes, there is so much to take in and so much to see in the tiniest things that I can�t remember ever having been empty. Oftentimes, math gets me. The ratios and the functions, geometry, perfect beyond perfect triangles and circles and connecting lines, shadows, equations, matrices. Blank screen suddenly filled and crisscrossed with hundreds upon thousands of perfectly intersecting beams of light, emerging patterns everywhere, like the tiles on a bathroom floor, their diagonals and triangles hidden within diagonals and triangles hidden within triangles within triangles. Upon a rectangular, ridiculous, now, white sheet of theatre screen.
I can�t remember ever having been empty, but I can remember having been terrified.
I nudge Caitlin hard in her ribs. She is asleep, contorting and twisting in dreams. She winces when I touch her but doesn�t awaken. I can�t even look at her; she looks so tortured. Maybe in Caitlin�s dream her intestines are being ground into perfect circular patterns by tiny, bite-size aliens that she swallowed with her breakfast cereal. Maybe the tiny noises Caitlin is making are screams in her dream, but in that world no one can hear her to save her.
I take a fistful of Caitlin�s coat and tug and tug until she jerks forward and opens sleepy green eyes. She looks around and pulls me forward urgently. �Was I talking in my sleep again?� she whispers concernedly.
�No,� I say, �you weren�t. Can we go home now?� The movie has ended and people are leaving.
�No, we�re going to stay in the movie theater and stare at a blank screen,� Caitlin says, then hops over my knees and disappears up the aisle into a cloud of after-movie film major cigarette smoke. The smoke carries within it barely concealed disdain for the mundanity of the movie. �It�s been done,� the smoke says. �I, on the other hand, am going to take my rolls to the Pacific Ocean and drop them off a fishing pier with string. When the fish nibble on the edges, it�ll create this kickass jagged screen edge.�
�But what is your film going to be about?�
�It doesn�t matter what it�s about. It�s postmodern.�
The light left in the theatre from the crop circle credits fading has a comeback, even though it�s dying fairly quickly. �And I�m going to not make a movie at all, just stand by the Pacific Ocean wearing a shirt that says, �I Am A Pretentious Asshole.�� With that, the light gives a last sputter and fades.
I am left alone in the theatre without even the company of smoke or light.
The sheet of theatre screen begs to be written upon. It begs to be filled with the rigid five-line groups of staff paper, and danced upon by ovals and flats and sharps and accents. I start writing music with my eyes open, but it�s too dark. Behind my eyelids, though, there is still a leftover screen. With my eyes closed, there�s this blazing white rectangle, almost crackling there in my head like the edge of a sheet of paper being folded.
The notes form mountains dotted with cream and green.
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I have the music on my tiny computer screen at home now like the embryo of the score was never a shuddering white expanse behind my burning eyelids on a frantic March evening. It took me months to force my rusty fingers to stretch wide enough to hold the music between the beats. I originally wanted it performed, but I�ve alienated all my old piano teachers by calling them outdated, and besides, of the musicians I�ve found through friends-of-friends-of-friends, nobody can play it apart from me. �You couldn�t have intended that for a pianist,� is the general response. �It doesn�t read like piano music, it isn�t nice to my fingers to make them stretch like that; who makes their tempo 180 per quarter in 6/8, anyway?�
I could say I didn�t write it for piano, that I wrote it for a white sheet of theatre screen and the vague imploring ghosts of wrinkled old piano teachers, but that would go over about as well as the image the smoke and light supplied me with: standing by the piano wearing a shirt that says, �I Am A Pretentious Asshole�. Of course I fucking wrote it for piano. And now I�m stapling the six tiny sheets full of impossible fingerings together so I can go crush their corners under a boulder in the park.
The idea is that, someday, a woman walking her dog while wearing a red sundress will spot a fluttering white something out of the corner of her eyes and go over to pick it up because her mind gives her no other choice. She will tilt her head slightly, wonderingly, and take the pages over to the apartment of her lover, who will have a long white mustache and bony nimble fingers. He will be able to play it, but he won�t want to. �This piece is empty,� he�ll say. �It has no soul; it has no story. And even if it does, the story is about nothing.�
I guess this is my idea of a cosmic joke.
And it will be late, so then they will fall into and beneath the white sheets on his bed and dream; dream about peach lemonade and iron; Nebraska minefields; old wine and stale rain.
22:43 - Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2003 coffee/love/writing
Writing isn't like love, or so it seems; it's more like coffee. You can fill two cups with an equal amount of love and not have any less - in fact you may have more - but if you fill one cup with coffee you don't have enough room for the other one, by which I mean I've been writing a story for Fiction Workshop, madly, pretty nonstop, so there's no writing left for this journal.
It's called 'White Sheet of Theatre Screen', just like the third and most difficult piece of music I submitted to the composition department (resubmitted as of today; I should know within a week what my fate is: music major or English major). The story is about nothing, just like the music. I fear 'All He Is', even in its relative mediocrity, is the winner in THIS short story face-off.
My dad left a message on my phone at 8:58 in the morning saying that one of the kittens that were born and were living in our backyard died yesterday in the neighbors' flower patch, curled up, no injuries, no nothing. Frog was seven months old exactly and was just starting to let my dad scratch his neck in the mornings.
01:18 - Sunday, Oct. 26, 2003 snapshots
snapshots of the weekend:
I dressed up as Brendan for the Halloween costume party and so got to do the Brendan-dance whenever I wanted. Chris was a Norman Rockwell painting. Brendan was a dinosaur. Andrew was Ziggy Stardust. Lara was the cowboy-candy-fairy. Gail and Robyn were pirates. The second I stepped in the door, Gail wanted a wrestling rematch, so we were on the floor amid a circling cheering crowd of people, AGAIN, me with my skullcap flying off and her with her sword, luckily, going the other direction.
Andrew approached this bunch of kids who apparently just walked in off the street and asked them why the fuck they weren't wearing costumes. They stared at him for awhile, contemplatively smoking. Then one of them said, 'What are YOU supposed to be then?'
'Ziggy Stardust,' said Andrew self-importantly.
They stared at him some more. He took another drag off his cigarette. 'Are you guys supposed to be skaters? Are those your skater hoodies?' he asked.
They looked at each other, bemused.
'What?' Andrew scoffed. 'Those are totally your skater hoodie costumes.'
They turned around, still puzzled, and left.
Last night, in Denver, we hotboxed the car and then I drove us all to Perkins, where we proceeded to park right next to a cop car. Lara went back to the car to get something right before we got into the restaurant, and stayed there for FIFTEEN MINUTES. Finally I heard a tentative 'Hannah? will you come here for a second?' I went, and she said, 'I can't find my KEYS.' Which was because they were in my hand, and had been for the past five hours.
The Perkins staff sat us right next to the cops, of course. I screeched, 'I can't read this menu; it's not in ENGLISH!' really loudly. It felt a lot like a Quentin Tarantino movie, so when we left, we blasted the Reservoir Dogs soundtrack at top volume while I tried my damndest to get lost in Denver. It's not even my fucking city, but somehow I always knew where I was, or I found myself heading to the airport or something.
This is going totally out of order, but I watched Memento with Nick and Ted and had an analytical discussion about it, which is hard even to think about, so then I felt really surreal and had to keep touching things to make sure my hands weren't going to go through them. Nick took my hands in his in the car and pounded them on the ceiling in a percussion beat on the way home and I felt enough like a drummer that I could have probably even done it myself.
